Writing poetry and reading books causes brain damage.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

I prayed hard and only gradually became aware that this fierce praying was a way of finding prologue and entrance into my own writing. This came as both astonishment and relief. When I thought God had abandoned me, I discovered that He had simply given me a different voice to praise the inexhaustible beauty of the made world.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into lucid form, then forcing them into the tight-fitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear. If the writing is good, then the result seems effortless and inevitable. But when you want to say something life-changing or ineffable in a single sentence, you face both the limitations of the sentence itself and the extent of your own talent.

In our modern age, there are writers who have heaped scorn on the very idea of the primacy of story. I'd rather warm my hands on a sunlit ice floe than try to coax fire from the books they carve from glaciers.

An author must gorge himself on ten thousand images to select the magical one that can define a piece of the world in a way one has never considered before.

Because I’ve gotten older, I worry that there will be a steep decline in my talent, but I promise not to let the same thing happen to my passion for writing.

I wanted to be curious and smart and unappeasable until I got a sentence to mean exactly what I ordered it to mean.

Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.